Blassreiter Episode 08

What They SayMalek's despair drives him beyond the bounds of reason. He transforms right in plain view of his bullies and starts taking his revenge. XAT agents arrive on the scene, but Malek attacks them as well. Joseph tries to persuade Malek but fails. XAT enforcements arrive and start preparing for a full-force attack on Malek.

The Review!As the new arc gets underway, Blassreiter actually manages to provide a glimmer of salvation and a coherent storyline that's possibly interesting.

Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)My distaste for the storytelling and pacing for Blassreiter has been fairly apparent from the start, as the show has had a hard time settling on what it wants to be in my view. The first arc was one where it didn't really start to hold my attention until close to the sixth episode and even then it was only because it was the most interesting thing to really happen since it started. The lack of empathy with any of the characters and a lack of world building caused me to simply not connect with the show.

The second arc has its seeds in the first as Malek steps up to the plate as the central character for it. After the bullying that he's received in the previous episodes as well as the death of Johann, his mental state isn't exactly all sunshine and puppies. When Malek goes to confront his bullies, he actually transforms right in front of them as he now understands that power is everything. His new form is one that is certainly similar but distinct from what we've seen before and it appears that his mental state may influence it as it's very malevolent in its feel. Malek has no compunctions about using violence since it's been inflicted upon him and he turns simply brutal at this point with his slightly older bullies, something that definitely fits into the wish fulfillment category of many kids in similar situations.

At the same time that this is happening, the mysterious doctor has been working her special magic on yet another member of the XAT team as Wolf finds himself to be her new subject. Wolf isn't exactly sure what's going on with it yet, but the good doctor actually provides a few possibly revelations about how events may turn out as she goes on about the grand scheme of things and that a chosen one of some kind is what's being waited for. And in the time until that happens, the other Amalgam's that show up must be disposed of. She's starting to come across as someone who enables these kinds of creatures to exist in order to get to the perfect one that she wants to see roaming the world. Wolf is likely to end up the same way as Gerd but with some differences since it's easy to imagine they don't want to cover the exact same ground a second time.

In Summary: Blassreiter doesn't exactly salvage itself here but outside of some of the fun action scenes in earlier episodes, this is the best material of the show so far. Malek's turn into the possible Big Bad for this arc or the remainder of the series is welcome since he's simply the product of his environment. Between his new role and that of what we learn via Wolf's change into something more, Blassreiter hits up some solid moments here that has me at least curious to see the next episode, something that I haven't felt for the majority of the series so far. It's unfortunate that it took this long to get to this point though.